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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
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Despite having business meetings every day I was here in Moscow, I managed to do a bit of sightseeing. June is a good month to visit Russia, as there are nearly 18 hours of daylight to see things. Some things are outdoors, and not constrained to normal business hours.

Near my hotel, the [Crowne Plaza at the World Trade Center], was a cute little park called "Ulista 1905 Goda". It is always nice to see large cities set aside space for nature. There were plenty of park benches to sit and enjoy. The word Ulista simply means "Street" in Russian language, and 1905 refers to the year of historical importance.

The [1905 Russian Revolution] was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire. It included worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies, including sailors aboard the battleship Potemkin. Alexander Adrianov became Moscow's first official mayor. The revolution led to the establishment of the State Duma of the Russian Empire, the multi-party system, and the Russian Constitution of 1906, ending the reign of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia.

Walking from my hotel towards the direction of the Kremlin, I managed to find the [Old Arbat street], which has been around since the 15th century. This was considered a prestigious area of town, home to many artists, academics and politicians. Today, it is pedestrian-only, no cars allowed, with various souvenir shops and restaurants.

This is [Saint Basil's Cathedral], on the [Red Square]. This is officially The Cathedral of the Protection of Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, but there is no longer any moat.

There is a lot to see around the Red Square to see. The [Kremlin] is a walled castle with an [Armoury Chamber] and various other cathedrals and government buildings to see inside. A ticket for the Armoury Chamber will set you back 700 rubles (about 22 bucks). [Lenin's Masoleum] is free of charge, but only open for three hours on weekdays, from 10:00am to 1:00pm, so plan accordingly.

Returning back to the hotel from the event venue on Wednesday, I walked past the [Cathedral of Christ the Saviour] on my way to the Kropotskinskaya subway station. It is actually across the river from the Red Square. Built in 1860, it is considered the tallest Orthodox church in the world at 344 feet. The domes are electroplated in gold.

I found the taxis to be ridiculously expensive here in Moscow, so I took to the subway instead. If fellow filmmaker John Waters can [hitchhike across the state of Ohio], I can certainly be adventurous and ride the Moscow Metro.

The Moscow Metro is second most used rapid transit system in the world (the first being the one in Tokyo). As a result, the subway can get quite crowded, but I found being squashed into a carload of Russian supermodels to be quite tolerable. The price is a bargain at only 28 rubles per ride (less than a dollar), with unlimited transfers.

While the Metro is a great way to get around the city, it is also a destination in itself, as the system was built in 1935 and has historical architectures that you can only see underground. At the [Ploshchad Revolyutsii station], for example, there is a whole collection of bronze statues of men and women in different work roles. For the statue of the frontier guard, many people rub the dog's nose for good luck that it has become bright and shiny.

Dispel quickly the notion that you need to eat traditional Russian food while in Moscow. A bowl of Borsch (a watery soup made from beets) and a plate of Beef Stroganof set me back 50 bucks! Apparently, restaurants know that only tourists ask for "traditional Russian food", so the prices are set accordingly.

I had to find less expensive eats to stay within my per diem meal limits. Where do the locals eat? Russia is a modern country, with plenty of Burger King, Wendy's, Baskin Robbins, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks.

No visit to any foreign country would be complete without at least eating one meal at McDonald's. Before working for IBM, I did software engineering for McDonald's, so as a former employee, I try to visit at least one McDonald's in every country. They have restaurants in over 120 countries, so I have a ways to go yet.

A meal consisting of a "Royal" quarter-pounder with cheese, large fries and a Coke was only 214 rubles, less than seven dollars. The meat patty was medium rare, just like I make at home. You just can't get that in the States where everything has to be overcooked to avoid food-bourne illnesses. The fries were a bit over-salted, but the Coke struck just the right balance of syrup and carbonation.

Moscow is home to many museums and art galleries. The [State Tretyakov Gallery] focuses on sculptures and oil paintings from Russian artists, named after a Russian merchant who dontated his collection to get it started.

Plan a good two hours to see everything. There were many guided tour groups when I was there, which slowed me down getting through the large crowds of old people.

There were over 50 rooms, with subject matter ranging from portraits, ships, and buildings, to piles of dead bodies in battle scenes. I especially liked the unique styles of [Mikhail Vrubel] and [Vasily Vereshchagin]. In many of the rooms, there were laminated placards in large-type English that explained the pieces on display.

My last stop was the [Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU)]. This served two purposes. First, it is situated up on a hill so that you can see a great view of the rest of the city. Second, there were street vendors selling souvenirs, including the ever-popular [Matryoshka dolls], military hats, keychains, and refrigerator magnets.

In other countries, I have found going to the movies as an interesting way to see the locals in action. Foreign movies are shown here in their original language, with either Russian subtitles for the locals or headphones to hear the Russian dubbed audio track. Sadly, I did not have time to do that this week. This poster, depicting the latest Disney movie "Brave", indicates that it opens this weekend.

As always, from a sightseeing perspective, I try to leave a few things un-done, so I have reason to come back. If you know of any other exciting things to see or do in Moscow, please put that in the comments below so that I can consider it for my next trip! I would like to thank my IBM Russia colleagues Rimma Vladimirova and Sunil Bagai for their suggestions and assistance.

Continuing my post-week coverage of the [Data Center 2010 conference], Wednesday morning started with another keynote session, followed by some break-out sessions.

Realities of IT Investment

Tighter budgets mean more business decisions. Future investments will come from cost savings. The analysts report that 77 percent of IT decisions are made by CFOs. Most organizations are spending less now than back in 2008 before the recession.

How we innovate through IT is changing. In bad times, risk trumps return, but only 21 percent of the audience have a formal "risk calculation" as part of their purchase plans.

Divestment matters as much as investment. Reductions in complexity have the greatest long-term cost savings. Try to retire at least 20 percent of your applications next year. With the advent of Cloud Computing, companies might just retire it and go entirely with public cloud offerings. Note that this graph the years are different than the ones above, in groups of half-decade increments.

It is important to identify functional dependencies and link your IT risks to business outcomes. Focus on making costs visible, and re-think how you communicate IT performance measurements and their impact to business. Try to change the culture and mind-set so that projects are not referred to as "IT projects" focused on technology, but rather they are "business projects" focused on business results.

Moving to the Cloud

Richard Whitehead from Novell presented challenges in moving to Cloud Computing. There are risks and challenges managing multiple OS environments. Users should have full access to all IT resources they need to do their jobs. Computing should be secure, compliant, and portable. Here is the shift he sees from physical servers to virtual and cloud deployments, years 2010 to 2015:

Richard considers a "workload" as being the combination of the operating system, middleware, and application. He then defines "Business Service" as an appropriate combination of these workloads. For example, a business service that provides a particular report might involve a front-end application, talking through business logic workload server, talking to a back-end database workload server.

To address this challenge, Novell introduces "Intelligent Workload Management", called WorkloadIQ. This manages the lifecycle to build, secure, deploy, manage and measure each workload. Their motto was to take the mix of physical, virtual and cloud workloads all "make it work as one". IBM is a business partner with Novell, and I am a big fan of Novell's open-source solutions including SUSE Linux.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cloud....

Bud Albers, CTO of Disney, shared their success in deploying their hybrid cloud infrastructure. Everyone recognizes the Disney brand for movies and theme parks, but may not aware that they also own ABC News and ESPN television, Travel cruises, virtual worlds, mobile sites, and deploy applications like Fantasy Football and Fantasy Fishing.

Two years ago, each Line of Business (LOB) owned their own servers, they were continually out of space, power and HVAC issues forced tactical build-outs of their datacenters. But in 2008, the answer to all questions was Cloud Computing, it slices and dices like something invented by [Ron Popeill], with no investment or IT staff required. However, continuing to ask the CFO for CAPEX to purchase assets that were only 1/7th used was not working out either. That's right, over 75 percent of their servers were running less than 15 percent CPU utilization.

The compromise was named "D*Cloud". Internal IT infrastructure would be positioned for Cloud Computing, by adopting server virtualization, implementing REST/SOAP interfaces, and replicating the success across their various Content Distribution Networks (CDN). Disney is no stranger to Open Source software, using Linux and PHP. Their [Open Source] web page shows tools available from Disney Animation studios.

At the half-way point, they had half their applications running virtualized on just 4 percent of their servers. Today, they run over 20 VMs per host and have 65 percent of their apps virtualized. Their target is 80 percent of their apps virtualized by 2014.

Bud used the analogy that public clouds will be the "gas stations" of the IT industry. People will choose the cheapest gas among nearby gas stations. By focusing on "Application management" rather than "VM instance management", Disney is able to seamlessly move applications as needed from private to public cloud platforms.

Their results? Disney is now averaging 40 percent CPU utilization across all servers. Bud feels they have achieved better scalability, better quality of service, and increased speed, all while saving money. Disney is spending less on IT now than in 2008,

UPMC Maximizes Storage Efficiency with IBM

Kevin Muha, UPMC Enterprise Architect & Technology Manager for Storage and Data Protection Services, was unable to present this in person, so Norm Protsman (IBM) presented Kevin's charts on the success at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center [UPMC]. UPMC is Western Pennsylvania's largest employer, with roughly 50,000 employees across 20 hospitals, 400 doctors' offices and outpatient sites. They have frequently been rated one of the best hospitals in the US.

Their challenge was storage growth. Their storage environment had grown 328 percent over the past three years, to 1.6PB of disk and nearly 7 PB of physical tape. To address this, UPMC deployed four IBM TS7650G ProtecTIER gateways (2 clusters) and three XIV storage systems for their existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) environment. Since they were already using TSM over a Fibre Channel SAN, the implementation took only three days.

UPMC was backing up nearly 60TB per day, in a 15-hour back window. Their primary data is roughly 60 percent Oracle, with the rest being a mix of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and unstructured data such as files and images.

Their results? TSM reclamation is 30 percent faster. Hardware footprint reduced from 9 tiles to 5. Over 50 percent reduction in recovery time for Oracle DB, and 20 percent reduction in recovery of SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and Epic Cache. They average 24:1 deduplication overall, which can be broken down by data category as follows:

29:1 Cerner Oracle

18:1 EPIC Cache

10:1 Microsoft SQL Server

8:1 Unstructured files

6:1 Microsoft Exchange

UPMC still has lots of LTO-4 tapes onsite and offsite from before the change-over, so the next phase planned is to implement "IP-based remote replication" between ProtecTIER gateways to a third data center at extended distance. The plan is to only replicate the backups of production data, and not replicate the backups of test/dev data.